Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

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  Note that such tagging of prospective enemies of the younger Kim came as his father felt the regime’s hold on power threatened, to an extent unprecedented since the Korean War. Besides any internal critics who had the temerity to raise their heads, the threat was seen as coming from enemies without. The policy adopted was to vanquish all foes by focusing the loyalty of officials and the masses, even more than before, on the elder Kim’s own person rather than on the country or on some set of abstract principles.

  In what may have represented a military-civilian struggle within the regime, Kim Il-sung in 1966 sacked leaders in charge of his economic policy and, the next year, turned around and dumped officials who had criticized that policy. Kim complained that some people had the temerity to suggest that, after a country achieved a certain level of economic development, it could no longer expect to maintain growth rates as high as before. Such “passivist and conservative” notions could not be permitted. A top deputy warned that North Koreans, including party leaders, must show “a revolutionary trait which accepts no other ideas but Comrade Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary ideas … , a trait which makes thinking and action conform to our party’s policy, and which accepts the policy and carries it through unconditionally, without the slightest swerving in any winds and waves.”6

  As enforcer of what the regime called its “monolithic” or “unitary” system, Kim Jong-il during the ’60s and ’70s presided over the shift to describing the state dogma as “Kimilsungism.” The term, with its specific connotation of one-man rule, was credited to the junior Kim himself.

  While the elder Kim, as we have seen in chapter 7, increased tensions with the United States, his son set out to intensify the personality cult. Kim Jong-il, starting work with the party, was convinced of the need to defend Kim Il-sung’s absolute authority and his revolutionary ideas “in order to tide over this difficult situation.”7

  It was during that period that the senior Kim made the transition from mere dictator to official deity.

  “North Korean leaders claimed that they opposed China’s Cultural Revolution, but in reality they imitated the Cultural Revolution on a smaller scale,” former party ideology chief Hwang Jang-yop observed later. “They created an even more intense personality cult for Kim Il-sung and launched an ultra-left campaign to rid society of all capitalistic elements.” Since there was no “visible political force opposing Kim Il-sung,” said Hwang, “the campaign in Pyongyang “was a simple affair that accomplished its goal with the purging of a few intellectuals. But that simple affair was the turning point in the Kim Il-sung personality cult, which went from strength to strength.8

  A complicating factor was a struggle between Kim Jong-il and his uncle, Kim Yong-ju, that began to develop after the younger man graduated from college and started work in the party. As we saw in chapter 10, Yong-ju seemingly was positioned to become Kim Il-sung’s successor. He had backers in high places, including Kim Il-sung’s wife Song-ae. Many people in leading roles in the party assumed he would be the successor.9 But Kim Jong-il went after the job. “The two men’s rivalry was based on who could put Kim Il-sung on a higher pedestal,” Hwang Jang-yop recalled. “Thanks to this competition, the Kim Il-sung personality cult went beyond the Soviet-style dictatorship” and became what Hwang called “absolutism of the Great Leader.”

  Unofficial accounts agree with the official version that the junior Kim from very early in his working career focused his efforts on promoting loyalty toward the revolution and, especially its leader. Koreans traditionally value “purity.” Both in Pyongyang and in Seoul, the ruling regime denigrated suspected agents of the other side as “impure elements.” In a typically Korean Confucian behavior pattern that Karl Marx surely never envisioned as a component of communist rule, Kim Jong-il liked to ascribe merit to himself on account of his descent from the pure revolutionary line. And he insisted that others acknowledge his superiority in that regard. After all, Kim Il-sung had demonstrated his own purity by refusing to deviate even slightly from opposition to the Japanese colonialists.

  According to one account, the young man displayed open contempt toward any Korean of his father’s generation who had shown any weakness toward the enemy and thus failed to meet Kim Il-sung’s high standard. “Comrade, how much did you devote yourself to the revolution at the time of the Japanese colonial rule?” he would ask one of his elders. “Did you ever commit anti-revolutionary acts?” (I encountered a similar attitude in a great many South Korean youngsters, of his and subsequent generations, who had little direct knowledge of the pressures and complexities of life under Japanese rule. They-were eager to reject and despise any authority figures—from parents right up to the late South Korean President Park Chung-hee, a former Japanese soldier—on the ground of insufficient patriotism.)

  One of Kim Jong-il’s early targets for contempt was his uncle, Kim Yong-ju. As director of the Central Committee’s Organization and Guidance Bureau, the uncle was officially the young graduate’s first boss. But according to a South Korean account, he soon learned that the little prince was not easily bossed.

  Over the years various reports appeared in South Korea to the effect that Kim Yong-ju had been captured by the Japanese in the late 1930s and had turned collaborator.10 It is not clear whether Kim Jong-il while working for his uncle got wind of such stories, true or false. Even if he did not, however, it would have been simple enough to punch holes in Kim Yong-ju’s own war stories and show him up for an un-heroic sort at best whose pre-liberation experiences would not bear much scrutiny. Yong-ju made the preposterous claim, for example, that he had been a member of the political committee of the New Fourth Army of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The actual members of that committee were such Chinese Communist luminaries as Liu Shao-qi and Chen Yi.11

  The South Korean account says that clashes with the uncle led Kim Il-sung to transfer the young man from the party Central Committee to the party chapter in North Hamgyong Province. In the provincial party chapter, young Kim is reported to have worked under Kim Guk-tae, the boss of the local party’s Organization Department. Although Kim Guk-tae was several years older and an army veteran, this was a more salubrious match-up as both men were second-generation communist nobility. Both could boast “pure revolutionary” descent. A graduate of Mangyongdae School, Kim Guk-tae was the son of Kim Chaek. An anti-Japanese guerrilla general, the equal of Kim Il-sung in Manchuria, Kim Chaek had died during the Korean War after commanding the frontline troops of the People’s Army. The two young men had known each other as boys.12

  Around 1966 Kim is believed to have returned to Pyongyang to work in his father’s military bodyguard organization. One account says he took the rank of major, and clashed frequently with the chief of the Bodyguard Bureau, O Baek-ryong, a former anti-Japanese guerrilla comrade of Kim Il-sung’s. There is a report that O finally became so irritated by Kim Jong-il’s presumption that he asked the younger man: “Am Iyour adjutant?”13

  Young Kim as a bodyguard officer continued accompanying his father on guidance tours and giving some guidance of his own. Sometimes he seems to have given advice just to hear himself talk. At the workers’ dormitory of a steel mill, for example, he barged unceremoniously into a room—to the surprise of the occupant, who was just getting off his shift and looking forward to his rest. Although the rooms were already so well equipped that the visiting mothers of workers had gushed over their comforts, he demanded that flat pillows be replaced with cylindrical, embroidered, traditionally Korean pillows, and pots of cold water with hot, freshly boiled water. The story does not mention his asking workers whether that was what they wanted, but it praises him for “taking into consideration those points which even their over-anxious mothers did not notice.”

  Visiting a furnace at the steel mill and seeing a lot of dust, he behaved like a zealous American Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspector. Told that a dust extractor was being built, he insisted “in a low yet grave
voice, which expressed his determination,” that factory officials shut down the furnace immediately until the new anti-pollution equipment was ready for installation. They might have ignored another twenty-four-year-old bodyguard who gave such an order, but this was Kim Il-sung’s son. They dutifully shut down the furnace.14

  Officially disseminated stories go on and on telling of his tramping through woods and fields and across dangerous steel mill floors, rolling up his sleeves and getting dirty, sometimes actually joining in the work—and thereby deeply impressing his hosts. “Kim Jong-il was working in person!” an official biographer exclaims, relating an instance in which the young Kim husked some corn. An official who was on the scene “bo-wed in spite of himself before the noble and loyal heart of Kim Jong-il.15 It appears that the supposedly egalitarian North Koreans believed—and were not officially discouraged in that belief—that the ordinary requirements should not apply to the son of the country’s ruler. That notion is rooted not in communist doctrine but in the determinedly anti-egalitarian Confucianism represented by the Yi Dynasty’s royalty and yangban nobility. For them physical labor was unthinkable; idly reading poetry the most admired pursuit.

  Bodyguard duty was the closest young Kim ever came to serving in the military. He had a uniform then, but photos generally show him in civilian garb. The regime had to scrounge to find a single, rather pathetic anecdote from that period indicating interest in military matters. In July of 1967, near the height of military tension with South Korea and the United States, he visited a coastal defense headquarters on the Sea of Japan. Earlier that year a North Korean coastal battery had sunk a South Korean patrol escort craft in those waters. The following January would see the capture of the Pueblo.

  The coastal defense unit, of course, specialized in big guns. But Kim Jong-il himself-was known as a crack shot with small arms—perhaps the result of many hunting trips with his father. Discussing the soldiers’ training program, he complained that they had focused on artillery at the expense of rifle practice. After all, they might have to defend their positions with rifles if the big guns failed. He had the men demonstrate their shooting, but they were not very good. Then he “stepped down an emplacement and, giving an example of the right way to shoot, he taught them how to achieve first-rate marksmanship. Looking at Kim Jong-il, who was drenched in sweat, the commanders felt tremendously guilty about their neglect of small arms training.” Or did one or two of them, perhaps, silently entertain dark thoughts about a privileged, twenty-five-year-old draft-dodger who had unerringly picked for discussion and demonstration the only skill in which he could show their men up?16

  After his bodyguard duty Kim Jong-il went back to the party Central Committee, taking posts in the propaganda and agitation department.17 There he became such a bloodhound in rooting out disloyal elements that an official version reads like a history of the Spanish Inquisition: “Kim Jong-il, who had obtained concrete information on the internal conditions of the party in a short time, found that there was a serious problem in it.”

  [Kim] discovered a symptom of a dangerous plot by some impure elements. He found that some party officials were leading an unwholesome life as party members. They were not sincere in their party work, ignoring party rules and concealing each other’s irregularities. … It appeared to Kim Jong-il that there was something shady about their lives and so he made a close study of their defects and shortcomings in all fields of their activities. As a result, he discovered that an official holding a high post in the party was behind the irregularities. … He discovered this when he read a certain book and when he noticed in it a passage denying the purity of the revolutionary tradition of the party. Many people read the book, but there was none who pointed out this fact. Only he saw in it an attempt to slander party policy and deny the purity of its revolutionary tradition. He lost no time in examining publications related to that book. His concern proved right, as he found not a few books which advocated bourgeois ideas, revisionist and Confucian ideas and lifestyles. … A handful of people, centered on a high-ranking party official, were spreading unwholesome ideas systematically and in an organized “way in the backstage, while pretending on the surface to support the ideas of the party18

  No name is given for this wicked Korean version of China’s Deng Xiaoping, but the high-ranking official whom the young loyalist zealot was pursuing appears to have been Kim To-man. Chosen in 1966 as party secretary in charge of propaganda and agitation, Kim To-man was the only one of the ten people given secretary rank at that time who could not boast of either experience as a partisan general or blood ties to partisan leaders.19 Kim Jong-il went after him and his followers, who had influence in “literary and artistic circles”—that is, party propaganda. The young inquisitor became particularly exercised over a play called An Act of Sincerity. He argued that the play was intended to gloss over the flaws of people he believed or suspected had not fought the good fight against the Japanese. The play, says a biographer of Kim Jong-il,

  was written to enable schemers and ambitious people to utilize an “autobiography” to make themselves appear like “revolutionaries”. … However, when the revolution faced a difficult phase, those who could not endure it raised their heads as impure and vacillating elements. Many of them had unknown careers. Nevertheless the party and President Kim Il-sung took a careful and generous attitude to them so as to allow them to hold responsible posts in the party and the state, expecting that when trusted and entrusted with heavy responsibilities, they would repay the generous treatment with sincere efforts. However, they betrayed the trust reposed in them, and as they were given leading posts and as their positions rose higher, they became arrogant, and later came to take an overbearing attitude, bent on achieving their own personal purposes in the party.

  This was a case in which Kim Il-sung was rooting out perceived rivals from within the partisan group and the military—perhaps on account of their criticism of his new, extreme policies20 rather than their views on literature— and his son enthusiastically piled on. In part the younger Kim was seeking to prove his loyalty to his father. But according to Hwang Jang-yop, Kim Jong-il also had his own axe to grind: he hoped to push aside high-level supporters of his uncle within those then-powerful groups.21

  “Already aware of their moves,” the elder Kim called a party Central Committee plenary meeting for May of 1967 “to smash the schemes of the bourgeois and revisionist elements.” Before that meeting was held, the Great Leader started an “ideological struggle.” However, “at first, participants in the struggle did not understand the seriousness of the situation.” Kim Jong-il, coming to the rescue, “unveiled the nature of anti-party counter-revolutionary elements who had raised their heads whenever the party faced a trial.”

  That started the ball rolling, and soon others joined in, spying upon and denouncing the target elements. For example,

  a certain official discovered an impure “directive” issued by an anti-party element written down in his notebook, and with an awakened eye he saw that it could serve as evidence to expose the criminal act of the anti-party element, and unhesitatingly participated in the struggle against the factionalists. Then many other party members exposed the criminal acts of anti-party elements by pointing out similar facts. The ideological struggle intensified. … After the plenary meeting the schemers who wanted to spread anti-party counter-revolutionary ideas within the party were systematically liquidated.22

  Kim To-man and several colleagues were purged at that meeting.23 More purges were yet to come.

  Hwang Jang-yop has explained in plain language what much of the literary purge entailed. Earlier Kim Il-sung had permitted, even encouraged, his old partisan comrades to publish their own memoirs. The regime’s ghost-writers made sure those volumes included plenty of flattering references to Kim. “But when Kim Jong-il entered the central party in the late 1960s, he called back all the memoirs,” according to Hwang. “Kim Jong-il was concerned that the memoirs detracted from the Kim Il-sung pe
rsonality cult and created legends about partisans other than Kim Il-sung.” By the late 1960s, North Korean textbooks were devoid of references to “many heroic figures. …”24

  Taking the witch hunt on the road, in July 1967 Kim Jong-il went to South Hamgyong Province and got involved in some rough local politics. He “worked hard there to eradicate the tendencies of factionalism, parochialism and nepotism which were still found in some party organizations.” In that province and South Pyongan Province, say officially sanctioned biographers, he “worked energetically to carry through the party policy of eradicating the effect of unwholesome ideas and promoting economic and defense construction simultaneously”25 The latter was the euphemism for Kim Il-sung’s policy of militarization. According to an unofficial North Korean spokesman in Tokyo, Kim Jong-il “struggled against local opponents who attempted to weaken the party leadership” and afterward “emerged as a leading theoretician.26

  Hwang Jang-yop, who worked from 1958 to 1965 as Kim’s ideological secretary, seems to have found himself eclipsed in ideological work as the junior Kim’s star ascended. While continuing to rank as one of the country’s leading intellectuals, Hwang was shifted to a number of often less important jobs before he defected, in 1997, to South Korea.

  Hwang was relatively fortunate in that he survived. After his defection he told of Baek Nam-woon, who, although “respected as the father of left--wing scholars, was purged by Kim Jong-il at the end of the 1960s. I heard Kim Byeong-ha, then Minister of National Security, boast that his men had taken Baek to the [concentration camp]. … As a scholar, Baek had not participated actively in the campaign against Kim Il-sung. He probably made a few comments that were picked up through wire-tapping and construed as complaints. Baek died in the concentration camp.”27

  More than is the case with the often fanciful-sounding accounts of his birth, childhood and youth, in my reading stories officially told about Kim Jong-il’s deeds following his university graduation tend to have the feel of being based on actual incidents. It appears that his hagiographers went out in the late 1970s or early 1980s and interviewed people he had been in contact with earlier, asking them for accounts of the meetings. Perhaps the original tellers— and certainly the sycophantic retellers—made any necessary adjustments so that the accounts would conform to the formula established earlier, in which the young man invariably left his listeners scratching their heads at their own stupidity and carelessness but full of admiration for his genius and his great love for the people.